Prune Your Garden

I love rain! For some reason rain is like coffee to me. I’m more productive and get tons of stuff done. I don’t like the cold so much though. But oh well.

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I wanna tell you about something that will dramatically improve your performance and get faster results.

Cool thing about this is it works on all aspects of your life. Whether it be business or spirituality this helps. I’m a big believer in taking care of every part of life. So what you need to do is prune your garden. Cut your weeds. Here let me tell you about my “A ha!” moment.

When I was in high school I was in football. Well our football team wasn’t clicking for some reason. We would do good for a little bit but we’d always fall apart and end up losing. It was really frustrating.

One year we got a new coach who was supposed to be a real successful guy. After a few games and practices he gave us this speech. At first I thought here’s this guy giving a cheesy speech but it made sense. He told us a story about crabs. Hold all your giggles these are real crabs from the ocean. He said he went up to the coast one summer and was walking on the pier when he saw and old man catching crabs and putting them in a big bucket.

Now there wasn’t a lid to that bucket. He thought it was kind of odd. A bunch of crabs in a bucket without a lid. This old man must be crazy. Then he noticed one of the crabs reaching up and about to get out. So he ran to old man and said hey your crabs are getting out, you should put a lid on it.

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The old man told him you’re not from around here are you. Watch what happens next. So he watched, and just when the crab was about to get out, all the other crabs pulled him back down. It’s no wonder they didn’t a lid. They never helped each other get out.

When my coach told me this story my first thought was, “Man crabs are dumb!”. I didn’t put much thought into after that. He told us all if we stayed away from crabs we’d be a much better team.

It wasn’t till one day I was heading to practice I realized what he meant. I was walking to practice when 3 of my close friends who didn’t play football stopped me and said we should go play video games. I said I had practice. They said why even go y’all never win. I wanna be honest with you a small part of me thought they were right and wanted to go play games. But that’s when I had my “A ha!” moment. Those were my crabs. Yea they were my friends, but they were holding me back.

What I’m trying to get you to do is think really hard. Who are the crabs in your life? Who keeps holding you back instead of pushing you to your goals. Whether your goal is to try to lose weight but you have friends who don’t care and invite you to eat and drink. Or you have a business goal and other friends are telling you to stay home and have a beer.

It’s time to prune your garden. Cut out all the weeds. It’s tough, but this simple strategy will help you reach your goals faster and better. Now don’t go and tell your friends or family Jonathan said I cant talk to you anymore. I didn’t say cut them out completely.

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I’m just saying put a small wall up and make them have less influence on you. Surround yourself with like minded people who are geared towards success and the same goal.